The overall objective of the proposed research is to contribute to further understanding of the effects of maternal marginal nutritional deficiencies on the resistance of offspring to stress later in life. It is known that marginal deficiencies of some nutrients during pre- and neonatal life may lead to biochemical lesions which may not manifest as overt/clinical symptoms of histopathological lesions until the organism faces a stress later in life. It is intended to confine this research to studies of nutritional deficiencies which may predispose an organism to diseases of the central nervous system. The approach to the problem is to deliberately expose pre- and postnatally deprived animals to an immunological stress on their nervous system, and to measure their resistance relative to that of control animals subjected to the same stress. Specifically, it is proposed to further previous studies from this laboratory on the effects of pre--and postnatal deficiency of essential fatty acids on the relative susceptibility of animals to experimental allergic encephalomyelitis (a widely accepted animal model of multiple sclerosis in humans). It is proposed to extend these studies to the effects of other maternal marginal deficiencies, such as vitamin B12 and folic acid, to the relative susceptibility of offspring to this experimentally induced disease. It is hoped that this research will point up the significance of this type of malnutrition and its implications for human populations.